The Internet is a big place, and it is common to turn to the Internet for everything from shopping and paying off a mortgage to staying in contact with friends and family. But for any small business, it can be hard to stand out among the crowd when it comes to competition in Google search results. Creating a brand name is hard by itself, but it is much harder to promote brand awareness when you are a little fish in the great big sea of Google.
Luckily, there are a lot of marketing strategies and techniques available to boost your small business’s visibility online. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) can come in handy.
New to the world of SEO? Here’s a beginner guide that will help you learn more.
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What is SEO?
The definition of SEO is easy. It is the process of affecting the visibility of a small business within the organic search results of a search engine. Simply put, SEO is an umbrella term to describe your online content to it appears on the first page of Google’s search results for a specific keyword.
What does organic search mean?
There are two ways to gain visibility on a search engine: paid per click ads and search engine optimization. Paid per click is considered inorganic/unnatural traffic, as the clicks brought to your website are directly paid for. The website owner will pay Google to list their website at the top of the search engine result pages, and every time a user clicks, a small fee is paid. On the other hand, SEO is organic because the results and clicks happen “naturally.” By investing in SEO practices, you can easily build a great digital marketing strategy at a little cost to you.
Learning how to apply the most effective practices can be tough. Luckily, there are reputable agencies such as Search Atlas dedicated to helping business boost their visibility online and bring in conversions.
Common SEO best practices
There are a few tried and true best practices any business owner can do when it comes to creating a strong search engine strategy. They include:
Creating a diverse backlink profile
To boost your authority with Google bots, you will want other websites to link to you. It is important to build links with a wide array of websites, but it is incredibly important to include competitor websites and other businesses in your niche. This not only tells Google that high authority websites will link to you, but it shows that you are a trustworthy source for information on your business niche.
Keyword optimization
Keywords are what drive a search engine user to your website. They are words you put on your website meant to match what a user is searching for. A good keyword will describe what your website is about, the products and services you offer, and your geographical location. So if you are a company specializing in HVAC services, a great keyword would be “ HVAC repair in City, State,” rather than “HVAC.”
Content
Creating content is one of the best ways you can give information to potential clients. Having a blog is a wonderful method to incorporating keywords in a natural way, so they don’t look spammy when the Google bots crawl your website. Plus, you’ll want to give your potential customers as much information as you can about your products and services or else they will just leave your website without making a purchase. You can also check the grammatically mistake in your content and rectify it with the help of this Grammar Corrector tool by Duplichecker.
While this doesn’t deal necessarily with your website, interacting with past, current, and future clients is a great way to build trust in your brand. Since social media is one of the easiest way to communicate with others, creating a place where your clients do not have to go far to reach you can work wonders in gaining traffic to your website and increase your sales as a whole.
SEO can be complicated if you don’t know much about digital marketing, but in an age driven by online searches, it is synonymous with success. Take these tips into consideration, but to take your business to the next level, it may be best to consult with an expert.